Easter Psyops

Search Engine Misinformation in the Digital Age

I was lucky enough to be able to redpill my mom recently about the amount of media manipulation that goes on in our modern digital age, and I’ll like to share my experience with you as a useful guide for how to wake your loved ones up to the various forms of propaganda that Silicon Valley is pushing.

We were in Pittsfield (Massachusetts) to see Dune: Part 2, and were eating lunch at Patrick’s Pub while waiting for the movie to start. While there, we discussed how abandoned the city seemed considering how many office buildings there were downtown. I decided to hop on Google and look up how many people lived in Pittsfield, and the answer that Google’s AI responded with was roughly forty thousand, which seemed low. I suggested that we fact check Google’s AI, and looked up the population of New York City, since that’s where I had grown up.

Google’s AI responded that the population of New York City was 8.3 million. Now this was very interesting to me, because I had personally looked up the population of New York City myself back around 2001 for a Vampire: the Masquerade game that I had been planning on running, and at the time the population of NYC was 10 million. I asked my mom what she thought about it.

“Well, maybe the population went down a bit because they can work from home now. A lot of people might also have left NYC during Covid,” my mom suggested. I felt that this was unlikely, since my friend Quan had recently sold his condo in NYC, and based on the price he got for the condo it didn’t seem to me like New York City’s population was shrinking. I pointed this out to my mom, and asked her the usual question I ask when trying to fact-check stuff on the internet: does this seem likely?

“Mom, the population of New York City was ten million back in 2001. Does it seem likely that the population of New York City would have gone down by 1.7 million over the past twenty years? How often do rich cities experience population decline? It’s not like we’re talking about Detroit here.” My mom agreed that this was very implausible, so I decided to try searching for that answer using DuckDuckGo instead of Google, since a few people in the rationalist community had mentioned it as a superior search tool. As its top search hit, DuckDuckGo gave me a much more reasonable answer of 20 million, linking directly to a Wikipedia article.

My mom had raised me in New York City for the first seventeen years of my youth, so we both agreed that this was a much more reasonable number. Then I asked my mother the usual question I ask myself when I find out that somebody has been lying to me: why do you think they did that? What was their motive? After all, people don’t lie for no reason, and AIs very seldomly do. If an AI lies to you, it’s usually because somebody must have either programmed that AI to be deceptive, or fed it bad information.

Me and my mom both put forwards various hypotheses for why Google’s AI assistant was lying to us. A good friend of mine who was also an extremely talented programmer had recently been let go from Google during their purge of white male programmers, and I suggested that perhaps due to Google’s DEI mandate they were hiring much less competent diversity hires. Also, he had relatively conservative politics (which he kept secret while working at Google since they are widely known to discriminate against people who do not adhere to their political ideology). Maybe Google’s strong focus on diversity rather than meritocracy was the reason so many of their search results were giving such stupid answers.

My mom put forwards an even more intriguing hypothesis, however. “Doesn’t New York City have a refugee problem?” she asked. “I heard on the news that a lot of the red states are bussing immigrants to New York City and the shelters and hotels are all full. Maybe the reason they’re hiding the true population of New York City is because they are trying to conceal the overpopulation problem.” I sat there in stunned awe, impressed that my eighty-year old mom had somehow become more redpilled about woke technology companies than me.

Anyway, our main takeaway from that discussion was that Google was no longer a reliable search engine to use, and I would rely on DuckDuckGo for my search results in the future. But the question remains: why would Google’s AI lie to us like that? My dear readers, I put the question to you: what do you think?